Patent law turned America’s inventions into a system

From Eli Whitney’s cotton gin to the Wright brothers’ first powered flight, America’s invention story is filled with milestones—but historian Eric S. Hintz argues they share a quieter common source: the U.S. patent process. He points to the Constitution’s inte

On paper, it begins in ink. In the human life of invention, it begins with something far more practical: the ability to risk time, effort, and money on an idea without watching someone else take it and run.

That is the thread historian Eric S. Hintz returns to when he looks at how the United States became a superpower through innovation. Speaking at the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. Hintz traces America’s leaps across technology and medicine—then places one innovation above them all: the U.S. patent process.

“It creates a system that’s good for the individual and good for the country,” Hintz said.

The foundation is written into the country itself. In 1788, the U.S. Constitution established an intellectual property clause. In 1790, George Washington signed the first patent statute, establishing a system Hintz describes as closely tied to democratic ideals.

“One of the things that’s really interesting about the first patent law is that it says the patent shall go to the first and true inventor,” Hintz said. “So long before women can vote, long before we’ve gotten rid of Jim Crow, women could get a patent, free Blacks could get a patent.”

The stakes of a system like this are measurable in volume. By 2026, the United States Patent and Trademark Office had issued more than 12,650,000 patents, according to its website. The office grants government protection for inventors during a period of time after their invention’s registration. When that protection expires, the creation enters the public domain—allowing others to potentially build off what came before.

“It’s a series of instructions of how to build the thing,” Hintz said.

Once that structure exists, innovation spreads, not only within one field but across many. Agriculture is among the early beneficiaries. Hintz says America’s feudal system helped agricultural innovation blossom and led to some of the first U.S. patents. European settlers built on crops established by indigenous people in America. introduced new ones such as cotton. and once farmers saw profitability. innovation followed.

Eli Whitney’s cotton gin—made it easier to separate cotton from its seeds—doubled raw cotton production each decade of the 19th century. Looms followed. Francis Cabot Lowell drew on British ingenuity to develop a practical power loom. helping turn Lowell. Massachusetts. into a pioneering textile town with an estimated 8. 000 workers. mostly women and girls.

In Virginia. Cyrus Hall McCormick created the world’s first mechanical reaper for the public—a machine that could cut. thresh and bundle grain while being pulled by horses. Hintz also points to Frederick McKinley Jones’ patented refrigeration system for trucks. which enabled the transportation of perishable foods such as milk to more distant places.

Transportation tells a similar story of competing solutions moving from concept to system. By 1776, Americans were walking, using horse-drawn carriages, or sailing to move around. Hintz highlights the difficulty of reversing natural forces: “If you think about using waterways. it’s easy to go downstream but hard to go upstream.”.

Rival inventors granted patents for the steamboat—John Fitch and James Rumsey—developed mechanisms to move vessels upstream using fires to produce steam.

Robert Fulton, often miscredited as the steamboat’s creator, commercialized the vessel. By the 19th century, he provided a way for the U.S. Postal Service to transport mail. “If you think about starting in New Orleans. you can get all the way up to Pittsburgh. if you follow the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. ” Hintz said.

By the 1850s, railroad tracks boomed in the U.S., spreading across almost 30,000 miles and reaching coast-to-coast coverage by the 1870s. In 1903, America grew wings when Wilbur and Orville Wright successfully tested their 1903 Wright Flyer.

“They realized, we need to add power in order to stay aloft,” Hintz said. He describes how the brothers also treated geography like a variable to be tested. “They actually write to the Smithsonian … and they say. what are some of the windiest places in the U.S.?” Hintz says that precision helped them reach Kitty Hawk. North Carolina. where wind was constantly blowing.

The Wright brothers also had a co-pilot whose work seldom gets credited in textbooks. Their sister, Katherine Wright, was instrumental in the process. “As one historian has said. there would have been no Kitty Hawk without Kitty Wright. ” said CBS News senior correspondent Norah O’Donnell. who wrote a book. “We The Women. ” about overlooked contributions of women in American history earlier this year.

O’Donnell said the Wrights faced a tragic mishap in 1908. and it was Katherine who helped get them back on track. She was also their chief operating officer and chief marketing officer, O’Donnell said. When President William Howard Taft later awarded the Wright brothers the Congressional Gold Medal. he said Katherine was the most important member of the family but she was not included in the citation.

O’Donnell called the omission common in American history. saying it shows how many women were excluded from records despite their contributions to the nation’s evolution. “As Julie (Morse Goff) and I were going through researching this book. we uncovered so many women that we were not taught about in school. ” O’Donnell said. “In our book. it’s all about patriotic women who were change makers. who were revolutionaries. who pushed at every step throughout our country’s journey to live up to that important phrase that all men are created equal with certain inalienable rights of life. liberty and pursuit of happiness.”.

Katherine Wright, who was also an activist and suffrage advocate, embodied those ideals.

Electricity is another domain where Hintz argues the patent system’s logic shows up as real-world momentum. In the 18th century, Americans relied on sunrise and sunset until electricity lit the way. “We’re no longer trapped by the rhythms of the sun,” Hintz said.

Charles F. Brush installed an arc lamp to illuminate Cleveland’s Public Square. marking the first successful use of an electric street-light system in the world. Hintz credits electricity with reshaping daily life. “When you can light things, your streets are safe, you feel comfortable walking around at night. You can have entertainment. You can go out to the theater. You can run a factory with three shifts, 24 hours,” he said.

Hintz argues electricity is likely America’s most vital invention. and notes that a recent CBS News poll found “Light bulb/lighting” was the second most common answer to “What is America’s greatest invention?” with 14% of respondents choosing it. behind only “Democracy/freedom.” Thomas Edison may be the most important and prolific U.S. inventor, Hintz said. “He has all kinds of innovations,” Hintz said, many of them related to electricity and ways to apply it.

By 1879, Edison introduced the incandescent light bulb, but Hintz said he was behind the entire process of generating power. “It’s also the transmission lines, and it’s all of the meters, and it’s the whole system of innovations that go into lighting,” Hintz said.

Instantaneous communication followed a similar ladder of improvements. Hintz says Edison contributed to instantaneous communication by building on Alexander Graham Bell’s phone innovation. which was exhibited at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. A wall telephone uses the chalk receiver invented by Thomas Alva Edison. who redesigned the telephone shortly after its invention by Alexander Graham Bell.

Edison’s experience with the telegraph helped him improve Bell’s telephone transmitter by enhancing call clarity and increasing volume. which led to the creation of the phonograph in 1877. By the 20th century, Bell and his assistant Thomas A. Watson had tested long-distance calls. Hintz frames the progression as a pattern: taking an invention. continuously improving it with other inventors’ work. and building a series of innovations around it.

Manufacturing shows how “system” can mean more than a machine—it can mean a method. Hintz says America’s manufacturing. powered by steam and other innovations that enabled factories in places without water wheels. grew into a massive economy that pivoted from small artisanal craft to scaled-up operations. He compares the old way—where a gunsmith made every part in a bespoke process—to the American system of manufacturers.

“That antiquated method could take a month until manufacturing came along in urban areas, where labor was easier to find, moving from an artisanal system to the American system of manufacturers,” Hintz said.

That shift aligns with Eli Whitney Jr. securing a government contract to manufacture weapons and collaborating with Samuel Colt to produce the first Colt Revolvers.

Hintz connects the logic of interchangeable parts to production at scale. “Instead of building every gun in a bespoke way. you create like a platonic master. here’s the trigger and I’m gonna make 10 of these all exactly the same. ” he said. “By making all the individual components to look exactly the same and interchangeable, you do division of labor.”.

He says labor theory led to the assembly line and to manufacture of spindles and typewriter keys. then bicycles and ultimately cars. including Henry Ford’s Model T. one of the first mass production vehicles. Hintz describes what mass production meant in practice: “It’s just thousands and thousands of cars coming off the line. one every few seconds.”.

Fuel pulled the story forward again. Ford’s cars utilized gas, and Hintz traces that energy back to Edwin Drake’s work. In Titusville. Pennsylvania. in 1859. Drake launched the first American oil well at a depth of 69.5 feet. ushering in America’s “petroleum age. ” according to the American Oil & Gas Historical Society. Hintz also notes that the first productive oil well in the United States was discovered by Edwin L. Drake.

“We discovered oil in all kinds of places – Texas. Oklahoma. California. ” Hintz said. adding that America’s reliance on oil is still central in politics and global affairs. “We’re still worrying about the Strait of Hormuz and oil imports and exports.” He says oil matters from 50 years ago drove innovation in nuclear energy. and now there is more experimentation with wind. solar and geothermal energy.

“But oil and gas is really hard to dislodge,” Hintz said. “We still pump a lot of gas, and we still burn a lot of coal.” He contrasts that with earlier eras: “If you go back to 1776, you’re pretty much chopping trees down and burning wood, but in the 1820s, coal kind of takes off.”

Medicine, too, is portrayed as a long chain of improvements that made modern life more survivable. Hintz says medical innovation led to Americans living longer, lowering mortality rates, expanding life expectancy, and improving understanding of the human body.

He points to Germany’s Robert Koch establishing “germ theory” in the 1850s through experiments with anthrax. France’s Louis Pasteur then began developing theories of immunity. Hintz says vaccinations emerged for rabies, cholera, and typhoid. During World War II, the U.S. and the U.K. worked together to produce penicillin to kill bacteria, eventually scaling production in Peoria, Illinois.

More life-saving methods followed. including the polio vaccine. innovations in surgery. pharmaceuticals. oral contraceptives and birth control. and imaging techniques like ultrasound. MRIs and PET scans. Medical innovation persists to this day, including the rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines that saved thousands of lives.

“The ability to develop medicines and surgical techniques, to repair different injuries and remove cancers, it’s been transformative and people live much longer, healthier lives now,” Hintz said.

Computing begins with counting and ends up shaping warfare and everyday life. Hintz says the U.S. census system. which counted the growing number of Americans every decade. sought ways to keep up as Americans lived longer and grew their families. “By the 1870s and 1880s, it’s getting really hard to count the census,” Hintz said.

Herman Hollerith used punch cards and designed a machine to tally census data. Computing data also became vital during World War II to determine firing ranges. Shortly after the conflict ended. the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer—occupying a massive room—was constructed at the University of Pennsylvania. Hintz says the computer weighed 30 tons and included “arithmetic. memory and control elements. ” noting that later it was used to forecast some yields of atomic weapons after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

By the 1930s, International Business Machines helped automate the Social Security Administration’s payroll system with its technologies. IBM is still making breakthroughs in quantum computing and artificial intelligence.

Then comes miniaturization: after Jack S. Kilby at Texas Instruments debuted an integrated circuit, Hintz says the technology became more compact. “It’s way smaller and it doesn’t produce as much heat and it doesn’t require as much energy,” he said. Hintz says this helped drive the personal computing revolution in the 1980s. leading to Apple’s computers. Microsoft applications and video game consoles. When the world connected to the internet, computing became mobile with the invention of the iPhone. Hintz notes that Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in January 2007.

“Now, you’ve got all kinds of tools in one little device,” Hintz said, adding that social media and video platforms now allow people to preserve their memories. “It’s a hugely powerful innovation.”

Even film and television fit the same arc of inventions building on inventions. Hintz says American scenes were confined to still paintings and portraits until photography and motion pictures arrived. “It also becomes, as you fast forward, visual evidence for police and prosecutors,” he said. “Photography becomes a form of evidence.”.

Eadweard Muybridge projected a series of images in successive phases of movement, which led to a meeting with Thomas Edison. The Library of Congress is cited here for Edison charging his assistant, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, to invent a motion picture camera.

After Philo Farnsworth invented television in the 1930s. television ownership exploded from 5 million in 1950 to 60.6 million in 1970. according to census data. By the 1960s. AT&T launched Telstar. which Hintz says helped pave the way for beaming television programs across the world and “annihilating space and time.”.

Lying underneath those milestones is the same idea Hintz keeps returning to: the patent system works as a bridge between invention and adoption, turning a private breakthrough into something others can learn from, legally and practically.

“It would be dark,” Hintz said in a way that ties the story back to daily life. He asked readers to imagine 1776 without modern electricity. He sums up the power of the technology in plain terms: “Electricity is huge. … It’s light, it’s heat, it’s power, and it’s transportation.”

The thread from 1788 and 1790 to modern patents is not one dramatic invention alone. It is a legal process that makes invention legible, protectable, and eventually available—so the next generation can build faster than the last.

patent process United States patent system Eric S. Hintz Smithsonian Lemelson Center invention innovation history intellectual property US patents electricity Edison Wright brothers Katherine Wright medical innovation COVID-19 vaccines computing Herman Hollerith integrated circuit